It's Judgment Day For Bob Menendez

A federal judge will sentence former Sen. Bob Menendez on Wednesday for selling his office — an extraordinary fall even for a politician from a state as notoriously transactional as New Jersey.

Menendez resigned from the Senate last summer after a Manhattan jury found him guilty of corruption. Prosecutors said he misused his power to help a trio of New Jersey businesspeople and a pair of foreign governments in exchange for bribes that literally filled his house with stacks of cash and bars of gold. It marked the end of a 50-year political career that made Menendez one of the most powerful people in New Jersey and gave him immense influence on the world stage.

Prosecutors want the 71-year-old imprisoned for 15 years, arguing Menendez is among the most corrupt members of the Senate in American history.

“Menendez’s conduct may be the most serious for which a U.S. Senator has been convicted in the history of the Republic,” prosecutors wrote this month to U.S. District Court Judge Sidney Stein, who will decide Menendez’s immediate fate.

But he is not expected to go to prison right away, and there is also a possibility he could be pardoned by President Donald Trump or persuade a higher court to overturn his convictions.

Only a dozen other senators have ever been charged with crimes, and just three others have ever been sentenced to prison.

Even among those senators, Menendez stands out. According to prosecutors, he is the first to be convicted of an abuse of a leadership position on a Senate committee and the first person ever to be convicted of serving as a foreign agent while being a public official.

For anyone who wants to hate on New Jersey as a hotbed of political intrigue and misdeeds, the last senator to go to prison was another New Jersey Democrat — Harrison Williams, who more than 40 years ago was caught up in the FBI sting operation known as Abscam.

Perhaps the most damning stain on Menendez’s reputation is the foreign intrigues: The jury found that in exchange for money and gold from New Jersey businesspeople, Menendez used his power to aid Egypt and Qatar while under oath to serve America and while leading the Senate’s foreign relations committee.

Menendez was also found guilty in a scheme where he tried to interfere in state and federal justice systems to help men who were bribing him, including one who pleaded guilty and took the stand against him.

The charges and Menendez’s behavior was also fodder for late night show hosts and water cooler wows. Menendez kept some of the bribes stuffed almost comically into bags, boots and jackets around the home he shared with his wife, Nadine, in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey. And the senator’s defense team argued the couple largely led separate lives even after they were married, attempting, at times, to throw her under the bus.

Possible legal maneuvers still left

The sprawling corruption case, brought by prosecutors from the Southern District of New York, was not Menendez’s first brush with the law. In 2017, other corruption charges ended in a mistrial in New Jersey federal court. He dusted off, vowed never to forget those who were digging his grave and won reelection in 2018. By then, according to prosecutors, he was already enmeshed in some of the corruption that proved to be his undoing.

Menendez is still holding out hope that he can undo this conviction, though. This week, his attorneys asked Stein to let Menendez avoid reporting to prison pending an appeal.

This means even after the sentence is handed down, the case is unlikely to be over.

Menendez and his two co-defendants also being sentenced Wednesday — New Jersey real estate developer Fred Daibes and Wael Hana, a businessperson with ties to the Egyptian government — have made clear they plan to appeal to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals and, from there, to the Supreme Court if necessary.

They’ll try to relitigate a series of thorny legal issues that kept coming up during the trial, forcing Stein to rule on questions that the Supreme Court itself has perhaps not fully grappled with. Perhaps the most uncertain questions were about the boundaries of the “speech or debate” immunity that the Constitution gives to members of Congress.

“This court surely believes it answered those questions correctly,” Menendez’s attorneys wrote to Stein this week. “But it can just as surely recognize that the Second Circuit could answer them the other way.”

Indeed, history suggests Menendez’s chances are decent: Of the 12 senators previously prosecuted, eight beat their charges either during trial or after trial. That history begins with Sen. John Smith, who was found not guilty in the early 1800s of charges that he conspired with Aaron Burr to commit treason, and extends to the late Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens, whose 2008 conviction for failing to report gifts was eventually thrown out because of government misconduct.

Menendez has a top-tier legal team. One attorney, Avi Weitzman, has an official biography that boasts he’s never represented someone who was sent to prison on criminal charges. Another, Yaakov Roth, represented former Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell in his bribery case and argued on behalf of “Bridgegate” defendant Bridget Kelly and former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo aide Joseph Percoco at the Supreme Court — which overturned all three convictions.

But, so far, Menendez has kept losing in court while facing off against experienced federal prosecutors who took down sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell and former New York Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, among others.

Damning evidence, star witnesses and the Trump factor

During the trial, jurors saw and even had the chance to touch some of the booty found inside Menendez’s home. They heard how the FBI was sure Menendez and Daibes’ fingerprints or DNA was on some of the cash. They were read text messages and shown cell phone location data that gave hour-by-hour and even minute-by-minute accounts of Menendez and those accused of scheming with him.

The jury saw a series of star witnesses:

A man who pleaded guilty to bribing the senator and his wife, Nadine, who claimed the senator summoned her during a backyard meeting about a scheme by ringing a bell.

A former New Jersey attorney general talked about a “gross” interaction with Menendez.

A former Senate aide who testified about the senator’s “unusual” behavior toward Egypt during a period prosecutors say the senator was taking bribes to help the country obtain military aid.

An undercover FBI investigator who overheard Menendez’s then-girlfriend Nadine say during a dinner with a high-ranking Egyptian official, “What else can the love of my life do for you?”

Throughout the trial, Menendez took a different tact than his co-defendants, who didn’t deny giving him or his wife gifts — gifts being the key word, not bribes.

Menendez did not accept this version of events, instead bringing in witnesses to argue it’s possible that he had been hoarding his own cash because of some impulses drilled into him by his Cuban family.

Menendez also tried to shift blame to Nadine, whose trial was separated from his and repeatedly delayed as she battles cancer. The gold? That was her family gold, Menendez’s attorneys argued. Her trial is now set for March.

The two-month trial itself was also unexpectedly boring at times. For what seemed like days on end, prosecutors relied on FBI agents who had no particular knowledge of the case to read aloud to the jury line after line of text messages, emails and other documents. This tested the patience of the judge and the jurors as the trial stretched through some of the hottest days of a New York summer.

And the whole affair, historic as it was, was overshadowed by Trump’s state criminal trial, which was going on in another courthouse a brisk two-minute walk around the corner. During a break in the Trump trial, a few curious reporters and spectators who had been monitoring Trump’s case came over to the federal courthouse to peer in on the Menendez trial, making it a literal sideshow.

Eventually, the complexities of managing a document-intensive case — necessary because so much of the communication among the witnesses was done in text messages and emails, particularly texts from Nadine — may come to haunt prosecutors.

In a series of revelations after the jury came back with a verdict, prosecutors said they had inadvertently given jurors access to material a judge ruled they should not have seen.

Menendez’s legal team has tried to get Stein to toss the verdicts because of that, but Stein refused, saying defense attorneys had a chance to catch the errors, and it’s unlikely the jury saw the problematic evidence.

Menendez may also be hoping for some kind of pardon from Trump, who previously commuted the sentence of a Florida doctor who was part of the first corruption case brought against Menendez nearly a decade ago. (The doctor was later convicted on other charges.)

Ironically, Menendez and the doctor beat those charges in part by arguing that prosecutors had never found “a duffel bag stuffed with cash somewhere.”

But this time around, federal investigators found a black duffel bag stuffed with cash.

There is also another intriguing coincidence: Menendez wound up in the middle of the investigation that ensnared him this time apparently by accident.

In May 2019, two FBI surveillance teams were sent to the Morton’s steakhouse a few blocks from the White House to eavesdrop on a trio of Egyptian men seated at a table, including one who was the subject of their investigation.

They were not there looking for Menendez, but then he showed up.

He was in the wrong place at the wrong time, today the public will see how much he may pay for wrongdoing.